Cold Fish

This one's a doozy. Starting out in the vein of a Coen Brothers film, Cold Fish, directed by Shion Sono, ends up like a high-toned version of Hostel. Though the film is too long and the ending is unnecessarily bleak, there are a lot of good things about it.

At the center of the film is a mild-mannered, to put it mildly, tropical fish store owner named Shamoto. He lives in quiet desperation with a teenage daughter and a pretty second wife (the first wife died). When the daughter is picked up for shoplifting, a customer, Murata, steps in and gets her off.

He is the owner of a bigger tropical fish store, and bends over backwards to be friendly to this family. They, in gratitude and out of Japanese tradition, feel they owe him a great deal, so they accede to his wishes and let the daughter go work for him, and live with him. He has a whole staff of teenage girls, overseen by his sexy and slightly Lady MacBeth-ish wife.

At the half-hour mark I still didn't know where the movie was going, and am reluctant to say anymore, so stop now if you want to see this film with completely fresh eyes. I did know, from what little I had read about it, that it was about a serial killer, and we don't know for sure what's going on until about an hour in. There are a lot of little clues along the way, but Sono has a devilish time laying out the story for us.

After we learn who the psychopath is, Cold Fish switches to a different type of film, a black comedy with a high blood count. There's dismemberment, someone stabbed in the throat with a ballpoint pen, another person bludgeoned with a television set. Human remains are fed to fish, bones are burned, and the climax sees two people wrestling in viscera. I found this to be ghoulish (and kinky--there's some good old-fashioned adult sexuality on display) fun but not as interesting as the first hour, as the fish store owners engage in a kind of personality imprisonment. The ending sees the oppressed become the oppressor, and also some disturbing scenes of female submission that seem a little too gleeful. This is definitely not a first-date movie.

The acting is good and subtle in the first half, but kind of goes off the rails in the second. But it's a stylish, interesting-looking film, and worth checking out for those into Asian horror films.